Presentations

Some of my recent talks

Follow the links below to view the slides. If no authors are listed then assume sole author.

2025

SASA 2025: A flexible mixed-effects quantile regression model for censored data and the longer version as presented to my department in 2025.

MDAG Workshop 2025: Beyond multivariate applications: Quarto for reproducible interactive documents - Sean van der Merwe, Johané Nienkemper-Swanepoel, Raeesa Ganey - with my contribution being the Part 1 Slides, Part 2 Slides and a few other elements. See the workshop website for more information. This work was also presented to my department in this form.

A 3rd research talk I did for my department in 2025 was titled A selection of consultation projects I’ve worked on recently.

I do a crash course on ethics for the actuarial science first years at UFS, and I speak at some UFS Open Days.

You can download my Bayes Course Slides and materials here if you are interested in that.

2024

At SASA 2024 I presented A quantile regression model for bounded longitudinal data and survival data - Divan A. Burger, Sean van der Merwe, Janet van Niekerk, Emmanuel Lesaffre, Antoine Pironet, again adapted from the longer version presented to my department.

At around the same time I presented my vision for my department in my bid for the position of academic department head to which I was appointed from 1 January 2025.

Before that I presented on binomial regression, or more explicitly: Flexible regression of bounded count data - Divan A. Burger, Sean van der Merwe, Emmanuel Lesaffre.

I gave a detailed practical presentation on Generating data for assignments using R, and a light-hearted discussion of myself and my journey, called Simulation is fun, for StatSNetSA that touched on similar areas.

Another interesting presentation is on Visualising densities in R which includes an integration of WebR for direct computation in the browser.

Lastly, a talk on Use of AI tools in Academics that might still be slightly relevant. I gave two similar talks in 2023.

2023 and 2022

Other 2023 talks include Prior selection for estimating the number of missing extreme values - Sean van der Merwe, Jan Beirlant, Andréhette Verster, both in the department and at SASA,

and Exotic statistical modelling for real data: boerewors, river cleanup, etc..

2022

Here the focus in my SASA 2022 talk: Robust inference in the presence of censoring, skewness, and extreme values, was on a Skew-Student distribution.

I also addressed the MBA students with an Introduction to Quantitative Research for Business Students.

Older stuff

The Power of R Markdown for Assessment and Teaching which discusses my extensive use of randomised assessment in my teaching - won 2nd place in the 2022 UFS Learning and Teaching Awards in the category of Innovating my curriculum through the use of technology and/or online tools.

I have built a new module evaluation system for my faculty and presented a workshop discussing the system and the tools used to build it.

Priors for t and skew-t models, with a focus on flexible latent variable models. The source code is also available.

Multivariate Data Analysis via Stan Modelling Software, with a focus on flexible latent variable models. The source code is also available.

Presentation for StatCon2020: Stan as an all-purpose modelling solution (video version with my voice). Also available is the slides and source code zipped up.

Department presentation on statistical modelling with Stan

Flash facts presentation for UFS discussion

Department presentation on Adventures in Statistical Consulation

Random topics

My EXCEL addin with tons of useful functions like copying tables in R or LateX format, simulating many distributions, logit transforms, deleting alternating columns, etc. Must be manually placed in C:\Users\You\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Addins and then activated in EXCEL via File->Options->Addins->Go.